Between U2 and The Boss stands trance in all its dubious glory
I sometimes wonder if the whole process of cultural aging involves getting into music I hated as a teenager.
It has happened again and again, the discovery more surprising on every go around. First there were the bands I liked as a kid then dropped as a teenager as I started to worry about the pointless fripperies of fashion: Queen, Iron Maiden and Guns ’n’ Roses among them.
I paid €120 to see Guns ’n’ Roses in 2025 and it was money well spent. There was a feeling of finalisation to it: I owed it to my younger self to see Guns ’n’ Roses; I loved the gig; I don’t need to see them again and I almost certainly won’t. €120 to perfectly scratch an itch.
More complicated are the bands that I never liked as a kid, with an ambivalence that often tipped into hatred as the teenage years advanced.
First there was Inspiral Carpets, a band I detested as a teenager, who seemed to sum up all that was rank and unnecessary about 90s indie, who I have have grown to adore, their music a perfectly Northern English mixture of kitchen sink drama and diffident emotional release.
There are more of these, R.E.M., the Sisters of Mercy and post-Syd Pink Floyd among them.
But most alarming was U2. As a teenager I hated U2, a band who seemed to stand for all that was rotten in modern music. They played stadiums, talked to the Pope, tried unsuccessfully to sound like the Madchester bands on Achtung Baby and were so damn sincere about it all that I couldn’t take them seriously.
Worse, U2 were the band that all the normal people at school liked, the buy-one-album-a-year brigade who laughed at Manic Street Preachers and saved up to go and see U2 play Wembley Stadium, going on and on and on about it afterwards in a way that suggested that no other music existed.
I couldn’t stand U2, be it early, post-punky U2, stadium Americana U2, post-ironic U2 or post-post ironic U2 when they went back to being all sincere about everything.
Until, inevitably, came the day that I started to love U2.
I don’t want to go too far with this. I’ve always divided bands in my head into greatest hits artists and bands whose every single studio outpouring I will devour. The Jam are one of the former; the Beach Boys among the latter. But it doesn’t necessarily mean I love one more than the other.
U2 are definitely a greatest hits band for me. I have precisely no desire to listen to the Joshua Tree, War, Achtung Baby etc. but I will pump their greatest hits playlist when out for a run with a leap in my step and a song in my heart.
Actually, they’re not even really a greatest hits band for me. I’ve taken the U2 Essentials playlist on Apple Music and made my own version, gutting it of Beautiful Day, One, Vertigo and more to make my perfectly U2 playlist of no skips. We’re talking about 10 songs - and that’s me done.
Hardcore U2 fans might argue that this means I don’t really love U2 - and I can see that. It’s not like I want to be a U2 fan. But the emotional rush I feel when Pride (In The Name of Love) or Desire weave their musical way into view suggests otherwise. And it can no longer be denied.
(Incidentally, for lovers of dance music, doesn’t the surging guitar of Pride kind of remind you of a vast Italo house piano riff, in its melodic intensity? It does me.)
Did I, perhaps, always love U2 and wouldn’t allow myself to feel it?
Perhaps. The complicated net of adolescent shame can be a powerful thing.
But I don’t think so. Music has long been a sacred thing for me and I can’t imagine denying myself a particular pleasure. There were bands I changed my mind about as a teenager - the Manic Street Preachers among them - so I could have done the same with U2.
So what changed?
Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s just that U2 were a little too present when i was a teenager, the self-proclaimed biggest band in the world all over the TV and radio when I wanted to hear Curve and Lush. Maybe they needed to sit, like a red wine, waiting for the day.
Or maybe, perversely, I didn’t really listen to U2, which seems a contradiction but isn’t. When a band are everywhere, you’re not going to seek them out; you’re not going to actually put on your headphones and give them a spin. But in the streaming age you can do so, without having to pay for the privilege or brave a trip to the record shop.
I wonder, too, if U2’s obvious influences, sat deep in music I love, slowly spun me around to the band - those Durutti Column-esque echoing guitar lines and the Echo & The Bunnymen-style love of the big music.
Where this leaves trance music and Bruce Springsteen, though, is anyone’s guess.
When I was a teenager, Bruce Springsteen was the other act that the one-album-a-year brigade loved.
And I hated him; hated his outmoded tales of Americana that said nothing to me about my life, hated his strained muscle sincerity, his bizarre musical theatre on stage, hated everything really, apart from Dancing In the Dark, which was an absolute tune, one that I suspected Springsteen himself didn’t particularly like but felt obliged to perform.
I thought all proper music fans - ones who read the NME and listened to the late-night shows on Radio One - hated The Boss.
So it was a surreal experience for me to attend Glastonbury 2009 - a festival I associate more with Cassetteboy live appearances and the Stone Circle at dawn - and find that everyone was really excited about Springsteen’s headlining set.
Don’t we all hate Bruce Springsteen, I wondered? Apparently not.
Among those who were excited about Bruce Springsteen at Glastonbury was my friend Ben, who I was at the festival with. And so, on the Saturday night, we duly headed to the Pyramid Stage for an audience with the Boss.
In the back of my head, I wondered if this would be a revelation, if this would be the moment I stopped worrying and learned to love the Boss. He was headlining Britain’s biggest festival, for god’s sake, so surely his set would be full of bangers.
When Springsteen came on and played an acoustic number I forgave him. Maybe this was his double bluff. Born In The USA would surely follow.
And then it didn’t. And by the time Bruce played his fifth song, which involved the tale of a cowboy and his frozen horse, I realised I was hating this.
(In the name of being fair, I have done some research. The song is called Outlaw Pete and it involves a pony that might - or might not - “remain frozen high upon that icy ledge”. Does this sound like the kind of thing you want to listen to? Really? In Somerset?)
Springsteen at Glastonbury remains the worst gig I have ever seen. Or not the worst, perhaps, but the one I have enjoyed least. I didn’t recognise a song until Because The Night, number 12 on the setlist; then again until Born To Run, just before the encore.
And it all felt so artificial, the strained bonhomie on stage that suggested Bruce and his group were, shucks, just another bar band that got lucky but sure were happy to be here playing music for us all.
At one point, Bruce asked his guitar player what time it was. Said guitar player replied that it was Boss Time. And my heart sank further into the cold English mud.
This should be the moment in the article when I reveal how, like U2, Bruce Springsteen now has a place of honour in my heart. I mean, I live in Catalonia, where Springsteen is an utter idol. And he is, without a doubt, a very good person, as his recent anti-ICE song showed.
And I’ve tried. I’ve genuinely tried. But beyond Dancing In the Dark and - maybe - Born To Run, I just can’t. His output says nothing to me; it’s not what I love in music; it feels artificial and unimportant, a total emotional disconnect.
I am fascinated by the idea that this will one day change, that I will look back on this post and Glastonbury 2009 and wonder what the hell I was thinking.
Is my hatred for Bruce Springsteen just the flipside of a big love for The Boss that will eventually turn itself around? And if I do start to love Bruce Springsteen, then what next? Happy hardcore? The Eagles? Trance? Christ only knows.
This is, nominally, a newsletter about dance music so maybe I should address the latter genre. I’ve watched the ongoing trance revival with a mixture of confusion, annoyance and amusement.
Confusion because I can’t fathom why one of the most curséd, unadventurous genres in dance music would ever merit a revival; annoyance because I genuinely think there is far better music that people could be listening to; and amusement because, well why not?
Trance, for all that I dislike the music, was at least a pretty joyful affair in the 90s, with people wearing Lego on their heads and brandishing ever more extravagant glow sticks.
As a teenager, circumstance dictated that I listened to a lot of trance music and went to a lot of trance clubs. With the exception of the very earliest released on Eye Q and Harthouse, though, I didn’t like the music. It was too linear, too relentlessly un-funky, thoroughly unsubtle and unadventurous.
I once asked a friend what it was he liked so much in trance and he mentioned the fact that it always felt like it was going somewhere. Which, actually, is a pretty good explanation of why you might enjoy trance. But if trance was in constant movement, then I never really enjoyed where it was going.
As an added factor, I’ve never really liked a four four kick drum over a certain BPM. Once you get to 135BPM-ish, the kick drum to me sounds far too relentless, a great nullifier of rhythm; an obligation to dance, maybe, rather than an invitation.
So, for me, no pure trance, Goa trance, acid trance; no psytrance, hard trance or progressive trance. No thanks.
And god knows I’ve been exposed enough to it. I was friends at university with a lot of trance music fans and so I spent many nights at a variety of Manchester’s trance nights. I had a good time. But I would have killed some times for the DJ to play something - anything! - that wasn’t trance music. It never happened.
And so every times that your Evian Christs, your Lorenzo Sennis, your Nina Kravizes bring around their trance revivals I just can’t swallow it: the sheer un-relatability of Bruce Springsteen at Glastonbury meeting the alienating thud of Return to the Source and I have to take my leave.
Will this change? Again, I have no idea. I don’t think so. but if it does then hopefully you will still be here and reading.
That said, if I ever get into the Red Hot Chili Peppers then you have my permission to unsubscribe from this newsletter forthwith and leave me alone in the dirt like a frozen pony.
Some listening
Alabaster DePlume - It's Only Now Once (Elbit Systems Windowpane)
It's Only Now Once is a story of musical harmony wrapped in human connection. Alabaster DePlume recorded his ornately titled new EP, Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue, on a day off from his 2025 US tour, after being captured by the musical connection he shared with bass player Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Tcheser Holmes. The result is as relaxed as old slippers, a real warming-dog-by-the-fire slice of instrumental jazz that sounds timeless, the layers of melody and percussion slinking around each other like old professional dance partners who are only slightly too much in love.
Jill Scott - Norf Side (feat. Terra Whack)
I’ve never been to Philadelphia, let alone the North side that Jill Scott hymns on the excellent Norf Side, in the company of Terra Whack, one of the many highlights of Scott’s new album To Whom This May Concern.
Oddly, though, Norf Side makes me feel like I have not only been to North Philadelphia, but I loved it and am now looking back on the place with warm nostalgia. It’s an incredible trick to pull off, a kind of phantom trickery of misplaced sentiment - but I guess that’s what happens when you have a bass that curls this elegantly, a drum line of lazer-guided shuffle (thanks to DJ Premier) and two vocalists at the absolute top of their game.
RA.1026 Carl Craig, Moodymann & Mike Banks
Carl Craig on the decks, Mike Banks on keys and Moodymann on the mic: what a line up came together at Movement 2025 and kudos to Resident Advisor for bringing it to our ears in podcast form.
The result is a suitably rollercoaster-y two hours of music, with songs interrupted, rambled over, re-imagined and generally messed with; and in the Soundcloud comments some people get very annoyed by this. But surely that’s what you want from a party with Moodymann at the helm and the recording takes you right into the bleeding heart of what must have been one hell of a night.
The track selection is immaculately Detroit, from No UFOs to The Final Frontier, and the contributions from Banks (sometimes radical, sometimes cake icing) and Moodymann make this into an incredibly special set, one that I will return to A LOT.
How much drama can you take in one tune? Because Zora Jones is really laying it on thick in this new banger from her Angel Crisis EP, which is released today (if you’re reading on Wednesday). The tune reminds me, somehow, of Indiana Jones stumbling across a huge underground rave as he looks for some ancient plunder, the party as inviting as it is deadly. The song has a stunningly nervous melody that creeps up the spine like buried regret and drums that hammer like the blood-chilling prelude to human sacrifice.
There’s a wild beauty to Street Druid, the new album from saxophonist and producer Ben Vince, which comes on the reliably brilliant AD93 label. Peace Spell, for all its name and the usually pacifying presence of a harp, walks the line between neurotic and nonchalant, the saxophone tinged with an unnerving spell of dissonance, like a walk in a sinister forest or a dream where you can’t quite work out what you’ve done wrong.
You could spend months crafting the ultimate dance-floor hit, tweaking the subs and tending to the hi hats until you have maximum lift off. Or, as in the case of new TraTraTrax signing LWS, you can shove an eff off drill sound under diamantine beats and reap the immediate benefits. The choice, really, is up to you.
In 1993 I was into System 7 because they were mates with The Orb who, back then, were about the coolest things in god’s creation. In 2026 I am into System 7 for all of the above, plus Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy’s incredible history in progressive music, which includes recording with Kevin Ayers, joining Gong and working together on Hillage’s mind-blowing Rainbow Dome Musick album.
In fact, the widdly space guitar heroics, which used to be what I least liked about System 7’s psychedelic techno, are now probably my favourite bits and Flower of Life, taken from the duo’s new album of the same name, has plenty of them, overlaid on what sounds like a comfortingly woody acoustic guitar base. A treat.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - Danny L Harle (the Cerulean interview)
Danny L Harle returned to the Line Noise podcast for a record-breaking fourth time as we celebrated the release of his "debut" (ish) album Cerulean. Mar Vallverdú and I grilled him on his greatest melody, working with his daughters, Dua Lipa's tea, Elizabethan composers, Ibiza and much more.
I reviewed the new Nathan Fake album for Pitchfork and had very mixed feelings. “Evaporator satisfies in a low-stakes way, providing an oasis of chill in a world on fire; it’s an episode of Friends with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, a familiar joy that won’t trouble the palate. But the record’s first-thought-best-thought spontaneity comes at the expense of ambition.” Is that fair? I think so.
Things other people have done
I really enjoyed Harry Tafoya’s Sunday Review of Madonna’s Erotica for Pitchfork, which made me really care about an album I have never given much thought to, as these things should. “While a number of songs double down on steaminess, there are just as many concerned with drift, transience, and the pits of being down and out in love. Dance music’s pleasure principle is still present in Shep Pettibone and Andre Betts’ production, but it often feels muted, brittle, and slightly hollowed out.”
This line, in particular, I loved: “Only the one that hurts you can make you feel better,” she intones with sexy, shark-eyed menace, “Only the one that inflicts the pain can take it away.” This idea sounds fine enough when you’re tied to a bedpost, but it makes for a pretty merciless view of adult relationships.”
The playlists
It’s 2026 and that means A NEW PLAYLIST, cataloguing the best new music of this year: you can follow that on Apple Music here: The newest and bestest 2026.
And on Spotify here: the newest and bestest 2026.
The old classics remain in place, too:
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest.
Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.
